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On Tuesday evening, Apple’s App Store over at itunes.apple.com started experiencing significant slowdowns. We first noticed the store’s pages stopped loading properly at 4:23PM EST, meaning the outage has already lasted over half an hour at the time of writing.

While this means you can’t access apps such as Facebook for iPhone from the company’s website, a quick check on iOS devices shows that this issue is not affecting the app store on Apple’s mobile devices (aside from app developer pages not loading). The issue is, however, also causing problems for the iTunes store (apps and media content) on the desktop, the Mac App Store, and the iBookstore.

For some, those stores are not loading at all, while for others they are loading but take forever to do so. Apple’s status page for its Services, Stores, and iCloud showed green across the board up until 4:43PM EST, at which point it showed problems for the App Store, the iTunes Store, the Mac App Store, and the iBookstore:

Twitter users started to notice as well, with the earliest report coming in at 4:51PM EST. A search for app store down on the social network shows that more users started reporting the problems soon after.

We have contacted Apple about this issue. We will update this article if we hear back.

Update at 5:16PM EST: Apple’s status page is back to all green. It’s not clear what caused the issue and Apple is of course unlikely to say.

The company did confirm the outage, however: “Multiple Store Services – 4:10 PM-5:12 PM – Some users affected. Users may have been unable to browse the iTunes Store, App Store, Mac App Store, or iBookstore. The issue thus lasted just over an hour.